President Joe Biden issued a series of executive orders on firearms, including an order on so-called “ghost guns:”

Biden plans to direct the Justice Department to issue a tentative rule meant to “help stop the proliferation” of the devices, the official said, without providing specifics.

The Justice Department is getting in on the action, too:

Biden…will also direct the Justice Department to draft policy that would scrutinize arm braces that help steady AR-15-style pistols. The braces coupled with shorter barrels make the weapons legally pistols, which are far less regulated than functionally identical short-barrel rifles. The Justice Department will also craft a template for states to enact red-flag laws, which empower a judge to keep firearms from people determined to be a threat to themselves or others.

The other actions include a directive to the Justice Department to issue a report on gun trafficking and an order for more funding of community violence intervention programs.

 But these items, many of which are proposed studies, calls for model legislation, and a nomination isn’t all that much to get excited about, particularly when weighed against federal court rulings. Consider a recent decision out of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that says, in effect, the Second Amendment doesn’t apply outside your home. The dissenters, in that case, were unsparing in their criticism of the majority opinion:

“The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,'” Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain writes in a blistering dissent joined by Judges Consuelo Callahan, Sandra Ikuta, and Ryan Nelson. “Today, a majority of our court has decided that the Second Amendment does not mean what it says. Instead, the majority holds that while the Second Amendment may guarantee the right to keep a firearm for self-defense within one’s home, it provides no right whatsoever to bear—i.e., to carry—that same firearm for self-defense in any other place….We now become the first and only court of appeals to hold that public carry falls entirely outside the scope of the Amendment’s protections.” The majority’s reasoning, O’Scannlain says, “reduces the right to ‘bear Arms’ to a mere inkblot.”

Biden’s orders are the usual “look busy” kind of affair all too common in DC. The court ruling? That’s where the real anti-Second Amendment concerns are.